Mark Bridge writes:

There was great news for some BlackBerry owners this week. The new 10.2.1 update to the BlackBerry 10 OS was released, offering a new incoming call screen, SMS and email groups, more options for locking and unlocking, extra battery usage information, enterprise features and - for customers with a BlackBerry Z30, BlackBerry Q10 or BlackBerry Q5 smartphone - an FM radio.

76.9 million tablets were shipped around the world in the last three months of of 2013, according to figures from the International Data Corporation (IDC). That’s 62.4% up from the previous quarter and a year-on-year increase of 28.2%, although a much lower growth rate than the same quarter in 2012.

Total tablet shipments for 2013 reached 217.1 million units; up 50.6% from the previous year.

The UK Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has published a set of principles that clarify its position on the legal obligations of the online and app-based games industry.

It follows last year’s investigation into gaming industry practices that were potentially misleading or broke consumer protection laws in other ways.

A new report from Alcatel-Lucent suggests that more than 11.6 million mobile devices are infected with malware. It’s based on figures from Alcatel-Lucent’s Kindsight subsidiary, which is able to measure the impact of network traffic.

Mobile malware infections were said to be up by 20% in 2013, with 4G LTE devices the most likely to be infected.

Mark Bridge writes:

Recent figures released by ABI Research have prompted the market intelligence company to ask whether Google is losing control of the Android ecosystem.

At first glance, Android dominated smartphone shipments for the final quarter of 2013. ABI Research says 77% of the 287 million smartphones shipped in Q4 2013 were running Android.